Even though DigiTimes had the story on Apple first, no one really
knew whether it was trustworthy. There's a reason its iPad 4
prediction was laughed at.

Despite a steady stream of scoops, nobody really trusts
DigiTimes. In part, it's because nobody has ever met a DigiTimes
reporter. In part, it's because DigiTimes has gotten a lot of
stuff wrong.

It appears to be getting better, and if it wanted, it could
establish itself as a legitimate news source. The question that's
hard to answer, though: Is that what it wants? We emailed
DigiTimes for an answer, and got no response. We're not alone.
The paper seems to rarely talk outside of its own pages.

"They're hit and miss," says one analyst we spoke with about
DigiTimes who asked to remain nameless. "The hit rate is 50-50,
which I think is kind of the design of their model."

Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge, one of the most widely read
technology websites says of DigiTimes, "It's a little bit shady.
It's definitely not reliable."

Yet, The Verge, like many other tech sites still links to
DigiTimes, and cites it, when it breaks big tech stories.

Topolsky says there is no set policy on linking to DigiTimes, but
his reporters will only cover their stories if they've heard
similar information from their own sources.

This is a standard practice for some tech blogs. Seth
Weintraub, who runs the 9 to 5
network, which publishes blogs focused on Google and Apple,
tells us, "We are extremely skeptical of Digitimes reports and will only report if they match
up with something we've heard or is plausible."

The reason they're skeptical is that DigiTimes has gotten a lot
of stuff wrong. Harry McCracken at Time magazine crushed
DigiTimes last year with a story detailing its numerous
inaccurate stories.

Digitimes has indeed reported much on Apple, and many of the
products that we said would be launched have never been launched,
or have had their launches delayed. But that does not mean that
we were crying wolf or passing along gossip. In fact, Apple have
a lot of its R&D projects and ideas tried out at its supply
chain partners in Asia. Many of the prototypes created by the
supply chain partners will never make it to the market after
Apple’s assessments. This is one of the major reasons why a lot
of the information we have disclosed has been seen by others as
inaccurate, but is still valuable to our reader base in the
supply chain. We understand the risks behind the kind of
reporting we have been doing.

In the future we will implement even stricter requirements for
verification of such stories. We will also add more analyses to
such stories to provide readers with more valuable information.

Though it is largely considered a rumor mill, DigiTimes has the
attention of everyone in the industry. Our analyst source says
investors ask about DigiTimes stories, "but they tend to take
them with a grain of salt."

The strange thing about DigiTimes, though, is that nobody really
knows much about it. We asked a few people in the tech industry
on both the media and PR side if they've ever interacted with
anyone from DigiTimes. None of them had.

DigiTimes is a really small site. Its "About" page says its
English site gets only 300,000 visits per
month. A really powerful scoop on Apple should be worth
300,000 visits on its own. A few scoops on Apple each month, like
DigiTimes delivers, should result in a much bigger audience.

The fact that its audience is so tiny tells you a lot about the
site.

"The information is rarely completely accurate, as it seems that
they will literally publish anything that they hear," says
Matthew Panzarino, managing editor of The Next Web. "There are
/kernels/ of truth there, but they're obscured because the
reports lack a framework of context or, you know, reporting.
Using them as a source is simply irresponsible in most cases."

A PR person for one of the companies DigiTimes writes about
suggested to us that if the site really wanted, it could become
huge.

Clearly, DigiTimes has some good sources in the supply chain that
Western media just doesn't have. Its more lax editorial standard
lets it report more gossip.

If it could turn the dial ever so slightly to remove the totally
egregious noise, DigiTimes could easily become one of the
biggest, most influential tech sites in the world.